A 9/11 Terrorist Was Used in a Facebook Ad

That's an ad for car insurance that popped up on Facebook the other day. See anything wrong with it? It's okay, I didn't notice it at first either but the photo in the ad isn't a random drivers license picture, instead it's the face of Mohamed Atta, one of the terrorists who crashed a plane into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

How the hell does this happen? Well no one really knows exactly. The best guess is that InsuranceSavings, the website who posted the ad, was using random images from the wide web of the Internet for their advertisement photos. And knowing how dark and screwy that wide web could be, is it really all that surprising that somebody plastered the face of a terrorist on a driver license? Ugh.

Mohamed Atta was one of the terrorist hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 who piloted the plane to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. His stone cold photo had become iconic in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy because it showed the sort of bone chilling mass murderer who was capable of killing thousands of innocent people. How it ended up on Facebook, as an advertisement, is a complete embarrassment to everyone involved and most of all, to Facebook itself. Facebook is notorious for letting third-rate, borderline-spam ads clutter and scar its website. It's repulsive, really. If Facebook wants to be treated like a big boy company, it should ramp up its ad policies and ban awful ads like this from ever happening again. You're not MySpace.

The company who posted the ad has pulled Atta's photo from Facebook and is conducting a full investigation into how this fiasco all happened. I think Facebook should conduct a full investigation too. [Chris Duncan via Copyranter]